Safe as in if you put your backpack with good useful stuff down in a shop for 24 hours and come back the next day, it will still be there, untouched. See for yourself, get a passport and a VISA and go. I have firsthand experience.
As for the persecution, that does happen sometimes, but take a closer look. China only recently gained control over Tibet, where a lot of that happens. People protest. Their goal is to make sure Xinjiang and Tibet stop doing that, and how does any nation deal with that? El Salvador arrested a ton of gang members at once.
Let's take a broader look at this. Do you know what the United States did during WWII? They stuck a bunch of Japanese people in camps? Worse than China. America, the land of the free, where black Americans could be slaves? America, where you can easily get deported if you are a foreigner? The Europeans, who didn't respect their African subjects? What about the United States's broken prison system? Its government crawling with corruption, whether Democrat or Republican?
The Russian Empire was no better than the USSR. Do you know what they were still using in the 1800s? SERFS. Serfs were dirt poor, they had basically nothing, owing everything to their owner and owning nothing for themselves. These were COMMON in the Russian Empire. You can't say that Englishmen are British but Scottishmen are not. They live on the same isles, the British isles.